The present invention relates to dynamic selection of Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), and more specifically, to using unique information of a client device to determine a TCP control protocol.
More than 90% of the Internet traffic is carried over the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). However, TCP performs poorly in wireless environments. The reason is TCP was originally designed for wired networks, and interprets packet losses as a sign of congestion. As such, TCP halves the sending throughput upon detecting packet losses. However, in wireless environments, packet losses may be caused not only by congestion but also because of wireless interference (e.g., hidden terminal, Bluetooth devices, cordless phones, wireless speakers or microwave oven near the user device). Since TCP does not distinguish the cause of the packet losses (congestion versus interference), its multiplicative decrease congestion control behavior can result in poor performances in heterogeneous environments with wired and wireless lossy links.
The networking community has developed several solutions. Some of these solutions require support by both endpoints and by routers in the path. Other solutions include different versions of TCP congestion control. However, these solutions require modifications at the sender end to support the new congestion control algorithms.